I’ve always been anti-MAHA, and always thought of JFK, Jr as a nutjob, and until recently I have found Ivan Illich’s 1975 book Medical Nemesis annoyingly over-the-top. However, after having spent 6 months in pain and discomfort while my doctor tried to lower my blood sugar levels first using Metformin, and when the side effects from that was too harsh, Ozempic, whose side-effects were much, much worse, and now see that the FDA is warning about GLP-1s negatively affecting eyesight – well, I’m starting to come around to Illich. It was while I was enduring this onslaught (which I eventually solved with diet and exercise, while my doctor wanted to try another drug) that I started becoming extremely aware of the dominance of numbers in anything that interacts with the broad category of “health.” We’re now encouraged to carefully examine food labels in order watch carbs, sugars, and proteins, and every other category we can think of, as well as to examine ingredients for oils, chemicals, salt. We’re supposed to be afraid of microplastics, even though science has no idea whether there is a causal connection between microplastics and illness.
Before I’m even in an examining room, I’m being weighed – a number that we treat as if it is significant enough to label otherwise healthy people as “obsese.” My blood test reveals a long list of elements, all with numbers that reflect what is considered healthy and what is not extrapolated across a huge number of very different people. How the individual patient actually feels seems to be considered largely irrelevant; if the numbers say you’re sick, well, you’re sick. Last year, I had some problems with my lungs – I was short of breath. The doctor suspected pneumonia, and sent me to have my lungs x-rayed. The x-ray tech said they saw a slight shadow on my right lobe – that must be it! So we bombarded it with not one but TWO rounds of antibiotics until I finally felt better, when we did another x-ray to make sure all was well, and the results returned the same shadow. Nothing had changed – the shadow was likely scar tissue from a previous illness. But now I’m healed!
“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health,” Illich wrote in the introduction to Medical Nemesis. “The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for “physician,” and genesis, meaning “origin.” Discussion of the disease of medical progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences, researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for sickness take up increasing space in medical dope-sheets.”
I’ve always been pretty healthy, all things considered, and for almost my entire life I have been prescription-free, so it’s only recently that I’ve found myself in the grips of the medical and pharmaceutical professions, and I can’t say I’m impressed. But it is so easy to fall into the obsession with numbers that are supposed to say something about our health, or our future health. I’m starting to think this obsession, as Illich said, is actually causing more illness than it heals.